Community and social computing

My friend John--also known as Action Figure John but that's a different story--brought by the most expensive coffee I'd never heard of until then. This coffee is so hard to produce that I doubt Starbuck's or Peet's could ever list it on their boards.

Around $150 or more a pound for the roasted beans, this coffee has to be shipped directly from the plantation. It is the legendary Kopi Luwak... and here's where the snickering begins.

This exotic coffee from Indonesia can only be found on plantations in Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi. Not only do they have to grow a good bean but it requires the assistance of Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, the Palm Civet (/snicker). This small mammal is common in many parts of South-East Asia and does the very important function of eating the raw red berries, digesting them, and then pooping them out! (/snicker /snicker) The enzymes from the digestive tract apparently help to break down some of the bitter proteins. The happily fed mammal then walks away to eat another day. Farmers collect the beans and give it a light roast, then vacuum pack it and ship it to coffee extremists worldwide. John ordered it from AnimalCoffee.com I believe.

I just had to try this out, even though I'm not a coffee drinker myself.

For our afternoon of watching the Tivo'd new season episode of Battlestar Galactica, John brought his pristinely packaged poo poo coffee, along with his shiny brass coffee pot and burner, which he uses to make Turkish/SE Mediterranean coffee (yes, the true gritty stuff).

John ground a handful of beans in his brand new matching brass hand-mill coffee grinder, since it gets smaller grains than an automatic mill. It takes about a good 5-10 minutes of grinding to get it that way though. Then with some fine drinking water for fewer impurities, boiled over a small alcohol stove, the coffee came out quite nicely.

He thinks we stillneed to refine how much coffee to water and how fine to grind it. Thegrit was not as fine as the Turkish coffee he usually drinks (about 2pots a day). But as you can see none of it went to waste, and people quite enjoyed it to the bottom. (/snicker)

We talked about crowdsourcing as a particular community use-case. It definitely counts as a use-case because of the use of multiple community services, tools and need for potential CMs.(I looked up Wikipedia but there's no entry right now, so perhaps I'll have to add one)

The concept itself is far from new but the delivery is. The core idea is that you pick a topic, invite a crowd to discuss or brainstorm on it, pick top ideas, let people vote on it. The way it's being applied in online communities is interesting. Take a look at a recent Businessweek story on this (and an earlier one from July).

The following is from our slide on this item that draws some from this:

nInviting the audience to brainstorm, design, or build an idea, product, or service.

qDefine the key problem or issue you are trying to solve. Be specific.

qIdentify your metrics for success beforehand

qDefine your interval for how long this project should run

qIdentify an appropriate reward for the group

qSet up a filtering process

qTap the right audience

qHave community managers to guide and build the community

q

nThe implementation can vary significantly but the model is what is important.

Thanks to Greg Hamilton and Scott Laningham, we are now on Podtech.net as well. Some of the entries are specific podcasts that Scott produces, and ther is a on-page player in the right hand column after the tag cloud that's pretty cool looking.

Wow, almost every hotel I looked around in SF is full for this Web 2.0 conference. Serves me right for pushing it till this week (although I just got confirmation from O'Reilly this week). Anyway, while I'm not at the booth, I'll probably go to a few sessions and need to figure out which ones would be the most interesting to attend. Unlike many other conferences, there are only a few which are multibooked; most of the sessions are sequential, which gives time to see everything (if you're free and so inclined, that is). Unfortunately, some of the session descriptions are so vague, I have no idea what they plan to talk about.

As business software begins to learn from Web 2.0, a new class of enterprise software services is emerging: Enterprise 2.0. We will discuss how Enterprise 2.0 services can and should work, and how such software can leverage the behavior of users to become smarter and more useful the more people use it.

The Launchpad event should be interesting to see what startups are coming up with. And certainly all the "Conversations" with all the big names out there. So many to see... Makes me wonder how much time I'll actually be able to spend attending these.

Our SOA Compass book is still going strong after one year on bn.com and on Amazon. It changes places sometimes when new books come out, or with events, but I'm just glad to see it in the top ten for SOA books. It's been a year to this month that the book went out and we've had quite a few comments, reviews, and questions about it over the year. . In that time, the number of SOA books out there are rapidly climbing and as this technology (or is it business?) evolves, I'm sure even more will emerge.

Several people have asked me where this news about the MIS course went out, so I've compiled a list and placed it on my wiki. There are at least 10 articles in traditional media and a bunch of blog entries.

No end of activities going on for me. I just returned from a trip to talk about Web 2.0. Lot's of interesting discussion and actually the bigger interest was on how dW manages a community.

I should be heading out again to the Web 2.0 conference by O'Reilly in November. (If you are at the show please come by the developerWorks booth and keep me company for a few minutes.) Things are obviously heating up for the startup market in this area. I'm going to have to take a closer look at some of the companies going to the conference.

One question I do get about our MIS course is what Web2.0 products we use and talk about. We use mostly open source tools like MoinMoin for a wiki, Wordpress for blogs, and Audacity for recording podcasts. However, we do talk about a whole lot more sites and products than what we use. Obviously it is hard to put all of these into use for several reasons: (a) time, (b) longevity, (c) utility, and (d) topic.

Even with a 14-week semester course there is a whole lot to discuss in this space. Any tool that you put into the course requires us to at least have a half-class on using the tool (as well as time in followup classes to discuss uses), and preparing a proper assignment for the tool. Next, the Web2.0 market is changing so rapidly, today's players may be tomorrow's laggards; it's hard enough to follow. The utility of the tool may depend on the environment we have; not all tools are readily something you can use for a class environment. Finally, the most important is if it fits into the overall topic. This is not intended to be a tools or programming class and we want to build a general knowledge about the types or categories of tools that are the most prevalent or significant.

This is why the majority of the tools mentioned in the course are discussion or presentation items only. In time, we may accommodate more tooling but that is still secondary to the knowledge we want the students to gain.

So for the Web2.0 conference, I'll be keeping an eye out for dW, for this class, and just for general interest too.

I do get requests from others on what the notes for this couse contains. The course is definitely one "in the moment", as in, "it's trying to keep up with the latest." The topics we discuss does involve tooling but more for experiential purposes than core training. Because it's so recent, I have not found a single book that could apply across the whole topic. I found about a good 15 books or so that could do it, but I don't think the students would enjoy having that much to read. Nonetheless, there's a need for a book and the students expect it.

In the meantime, the course is a combination of :

many slides - often with too much detail on them (not great for a business pitch but perfect for a class)

lots of reviews/overviews of Web2.0 sites (by us and by the students)

short in-class skillbuilding activities - for communications skills

assignment and in-class presentations - do research on a Web2.0 site and present to class - encourage presentation-giving skills

guest speakers - give industry perspective on different aspects of the course.

tools assignments - blogs, wikis, podcasts - get used to tools

final project - students get a group of others to work with and organize into a community, teach the tools

This is as much in the delivery and activities as it is in the content. We tell them it's a course on leadership and working with people. They may learn the tools but this is not a technical development or a software training course. The slides are plentiful and can be expanded into more written information.

I'll ask the public: do you think I should put this information together into a book?

I've written or co-written about 6-7 books already but they are always so much more work than the time/payoff. There are a lot of books out there but as I said, this is a how-to course and not specifically on tools or a particular category (e.g., blogging). Anyway, let me know what you think.

So far, I have not mentioned more details of the final project because we have not yet told the students--if you're reading this--what it entails. We'll probably describe this in the next week or so, and I'll post it then.

I've asked our dev team to set up a wiki for me and hopefully should have one soon. I'll see about post the notes, and files there.

As part of the Managing online communities course, students have a semester-long assignment to blog weekly. This is to force the habit of writing on a regular basis and feeling the experience for themselves. As a Community manager they would have to try to encourage other people to blog regularly, but as most bloggers know (most blogs fail due to lack of updates) it isn't trivial to write on a regular basis. When you hit the workforce, it becomes even more difficult.

In any case, all our MIS 300 blogs can be read by the public. I think only the first 38 of those blogs are operational (the number of students we have). You'll find varying degrees of creativity and coverage, but that is to be expected.

Other tools-based assignments include those on forums, group editing a wiki, and creating a podcast. I'll try to point to those when they are ready.